I remember
Sitting in your yard
Thinking that was all there ever was
You were sixty-four then
I was 8 or so,
You started balding. I didn't know why
You joked about your wig,
That you got the wrong color.
Your mother, she left just before you did
I didn't know you died.

I found out two years later,
Your son was cruel, I don't know how you raised him
You weren't family by blood.
but you're still the closest thing
That I ever had.

He rubbed at his head, a stinging kind of numbness,
bloodied pieces of his own skin were stuck there now, he wiped it on his sweater
(that used to be blue, now it was mostly this muddy brown-purple color from the blood and dirt)
he thought for sure that he was dying, he was abandoned there,
out in some alleyway.
someone had taken him out to the garbage, he had no idea who, he couldn’t bring himself to care.
he leaned against the building, bleeding and thinking.
he wondered if he’d get a gravestone.
his mom was dead now, why would he?
he didn’t die that day
he got to live another year,
but he never did get a gravestone.

he was buried in his childhood home’s backyard,
a few steps away from where his sister was buried alive, he wondered where she was now that he knew she hadn’t died. he hoped she somehow found him. he hoped the tragedy of her little brother lying ****** in an unmarked grave was enough for her to forgive all he’d done.
he didn’t regret it,
it was always going to end this way.
he’d carry no guilt to his hole in the ground.

Two cars, separate, the people inside would never meet outside of this,
A young woman, her name will not be spoken here.
She was reckless, but she didn’t intend cruelty.
She was trying to get home
Now in the second car, the girl and her mother were headed to a funeral, out of province
They never made it, and their family are now planning another.
You will not know the two who fell, but
An entire little town in Canada will remember where they once walked.
A sister, a daughter, at 21, now an orphan.
She will not recover.
The uninjured woman, her kids will not soon forget
What she was willing to do.
I am not saying to lock the woman away forever,
Maybe she wasn’t capable of ******,
Maybe she’d never hurt a fly,
Maybe she loves her kids, but today, she did not.
Do we forgive, and forget something like this?
I know her name,
And the orphan will forever know her name
But I will swear, to whatever god, to whatever I can find,
She may be forgiven, she may run
But this is more than her.
With any say,
I will never be stained,
With another human’s life.